When a Deal Goes Bad. $150 or $150,000.

I woke up early this morning and did the sleepy-eye-shuffle over to my computer to see if anything monumental had occurred while I was in dreamland. A simple retweet or a tweet getting ‘favorited’ can set the vibe for a great day. But, hey, I’m open to super big excitement as well 😉

This morning’s email brought the super big. I had official emails from two different companies regarding a domain name that I had for sale. The first was from GoDaddy that said, “Congratulations! Your premium domain listing has sold!” Another email from a reputable escrow service was entitled, “The Buyer has Agreed to your Terms.” The domain name was priced at $150,000.

Woah!! Was this real?! It looked real. Why shouldn’t it be real? It was a great branding domain name and someone snagged it to launch them into business stardom. Why shouldn’t I receive a nice little miracle from above for coming up with the catchy phrase, plus maybe a little karmic return for all of the hours I work 🙂

My honey was still sleeping so I woke him up with, “You’re not going to believe this, but I might have sold a domain name for $150,000! I’ve got official emails from two companies and one says the payment is being processed now!” That was enough to get him rolling out of bed to check out the emails. He agreed they looked like the real deal. Vegas, Baby!!!

It seemed too good to be true. I called GoDaddy and asked if the transaction was real and/or if anything could go wrong with it. I told them it was imperative that I know right now whether to order a regular coffee or a latte at my favorite coffee shop 😉 They told me “Congratulations,” but also said they would work on verifying the buyer.

Next I checked with Escrow.com to see if they could shed any light on whether the transaction was valid. Their records indicated the buyer had not yet entered any payment information. Yikes…not good. Vegas had been such a clear vision an hour ago and now it was blurring out.

Then I started thinking, why didn’t the buyer try and negotiate a lower price with me instead of hitting the BUY NOW button on the auction site? I noticed the time stamp. The emails had come in at 3:00 a.m. Had someone copped a good martini buzz and gone into super entrepreneur ‘I can do anything’ mode?’ Or did impaired vision eliminate a zero or two in the purchase price?

Within a few hours, the mystery unravelled. I received official emails from GoDaddy and Escrow.com that the deal was cancelled. Major disappointment 🙁

Was it ever really a deal in the first place? Probably not. GoDaddy reported that Bad Dog Buyer had purchased several high value domain names at the same time… and refused to make payments on any of them.

Who would do this? I wonder if some cyber scammer was experimenting with some devious plan. Or could it have been a 15-year-old entrepreneur that thought his parents would make the payment because they always foot the bill for his online purchases? What about the martini theory? That may still hold water. Regardless of the elusive facts, I was told this was a rare occurrence.

How did I feel when I got the notification that the deal was off? Naive. Angry. Disappointed. Violated. I might have flung a few choice words around for five minutes 😉

When a deal goes bad, it sucks. No matter whether it’s a $150 loan that doesn’t get repaid or a $150,000 scam, it’s that feeling of being violated and taken advantage of that just doesn’t sit well. And when the numbers creep into the six-digit range, we might have to add the heartbreak of crushed dreams into the mix.

It’s then time to shake it off and get back to the basics of the golden nugget of wisdom that we may have heard once or twice – if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Woof.

Sometimes you just have to sing the blues to cheer you up. Stay tuned for the music video… “It’s A Dog’s World,” an original tune by the Rock Pups, a band put together by MoneyDogz when they are not investing money.

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4 Comments

I would be very suspicious of such “deals” until money was in the bank though.

How are you getting on with buying and selling URLs then? I have heard of the process before but not heard of any real life cases where people have actually revealed exactly how they are doing it and how much they are making (if anything). I’d love to see a full post on that (if you have done one already feel free to call me a lazy goodfernuthin and post the link in the comments reply!?) 🙂

I must admit, the whole ‘what if’ thing was quite fun at first 🙂 despite the fact that I was still waiting for payment confirmation I had requested from Godaddy and Escrow.com. I found it odd to get both Congratulations! and ‘payment is being processed’ emails from these companies without a payment actually being made. If you want to learn about the domain investment process, go to http://www.domainsherpa.com. Mike Cyger and the other sherpas share their expertise. Here’s a great beginner video on how to sell in the major marketplaces… http://www.domainsherpa.com/sell-at-marketplaces/

They need to change their software to make the messages more accurate as they correspond to triggers. Hopefully they will…I gave them a bit of grief on that 🙂 Thanks for your comments! Good luck to you!!!